From the author of An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language,
here’s the antidote to fuzzy thinking, with furry animals!
Have you read (or stumbled into) one too many irrational
online debates? Ali Almossawi certainly had, so he wrote An Illustrated Book of
Bad Arguments! This handy guide is here to bring the internet age a much-needed
dose of old-school logic (really old-school, a la Aristotle).
Here are cogent explanations of the straw man fallacy, the
slippery slope argument, the ad hominem attack, and other common attempts at
reasoning that actually fall short-plus a beautifully drawn menagerie of
animals who (adorably) commit every logical faux pas. Rabbit thinks a strange
light in the sky must be a UFO because no one can prove otherwise (the appeal
to ignorance). And Lion doesn’t believe that gas emissions harm the planet
because, if that were true, he wouldn’t like the result (the argument from
consequences).
Once you learn to recognize these abuses of reason, they
start to crop up everywhere from congressional debate to You Tube comments –
which makes this geek-chic book a must for anyone in the habit of holding
opinions.
19 full-page illustrations!
About The Author
Ali Almossawi is an author of books on critical thinking
and computer science education, and the creator of An
Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. He is also a principal engineer at Apple and was formerly a data visualization engineer at Mozilla. He
has stated that his day job helps his writing by constraining his time.
